Today, the Internet is a useful tool for purchasing products or services. A sale may occur online after a lead has been provided from a lead supplier, which may identify a group of prospective customers, where the lead supplier may be a party other than the seller of the product or service.
Typically, in such situations, the lead supplier may generate an invoice where the seller may compensate the lead supplier for a lead that led to the sale of a product. For example, in the automobile sales industry, there may be a website where potential customers seeking to purchase a car can enter information in order to receive information about car dealerships or online sellers, and contact or be contacted by these car sellers. In such a situation, a business relationship might be created where the dealership or seller could compensate the lead supplier for providing the lead.
Oftentimes, invoices for this business model may be based on easily measurable events such as banner views, page clicks, or the leads themselves. In these situations, the lead suppliers may create an invoice for the sellers, based on information that is within their control as the invoicing party. Since this type of information is within the lead suppliers' control, a lead supplier may easily generate an invoice based on how many times a customer has viewed a banner on its website, clicked an advertisement, or generated a lead.
While looking at customer activity on a lead supplier's website may provide some indication of customer exposure to seller advertisements or whether the customer contacts a seller, it may not provide an accurate indication of how many leads from the lead suppliers actually result in a sale. When a lead is provided, many different actions can occur. For instance, with an online automobile lead, the customer submitting the lead may (1) not purchase at all, (2) purchase somewhere else, (3) purchase as indicated in the lead, or (4) purchase a different product from the same seller, which may not exactly match the lead sent. Although there might be an increased likelihood of a sale occurring from the number of times an advertisement is viewed or a lead is created, this information may not provide any accurate indication of how successfully a lead becomes a sale. Unlike the advertisement and lead information, sales information may not be in the invoicing party's (i.e. the lead supplier's) control, and may mainly reside with other parties, such as the seller.
Even if a lead supplier, or any other invoice-generating party, wanted to receive information from a seller about whether a lead led to a sale, the nature of the relationship is such that a lead supplier or the invoice-generating party would not be able to rely on the seller to self-report sales that are invoice-able. The seller has very little incentive to keep track of leads that become actual sales, because a successful match only results in the seller having to compensate the invoicing party further. Additionally, even if a seller wanted to track leads and sales, it would need to expend a great deal of administrative effort to follow exactly what leads led to a successful purchase of a car, and that effort could be costly to the seller. Thus, with the current system a tension may exist between the lead supplier who lacks sales information but wants to generate invoices on successful leads and the seller who has sales information but has no desire or incentive to put in the effort of tracking a sale from a lead.
For example, one online referral system allows for online and offline collection of information on potential purchasers from lead suppliers and matches this information with relevant participating sellers. See WO 01/40898, which is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein. The lead supplier may join this referral system and be rewarded for each lead supplied or for each sale made. The system attempts to track the sale made by collecting information from the merchants and the customers of the merchants' products and/or services. For instance, when a sale is successfully consummated, the merchant may update the information on the lead and pay the system accordingly. This system runs into the problems mentioned previously relating to how little incentive sellers have to self-report.
There is a need for improved systems and methods of sales matching that may accurately determine how many leads end up in actual sales and generates invoices accordingly.